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Strap on your wrist jets and load up your weapons because Echo Combat, the upcoming first-person zero-gravity VR shooter from Lone Echo and Echo Arena developers, Ready at Dawn, is heading back into Open Beta. The Open Beta 4 period is now live starting today and lasts until Sunday, September 9th, at 9AM PT with patch 14.0, bringing with it lots of bug fixes, party support, and balance changes.

More details in the trailer:

One of the featured changes with this most recent patch that’s very welcomed is the addition of new cover points throughout the map. Since Echo Combat only has a single map for its one game mode getting the balance just right is crucial.

The main areas of focus for the rest of the new patch focus on the Arc Mine gadget, 2D spectator mode fixes, nerfing the Barrier Tac-Mod, spawn timer adjustments, and various other tweaks.

We’ve written detailed impressions of Echo Combat, compared it to the similar upcoming VR shooter from Ubisoft Space Junkies side-by-side, and livestreamed the Rift-exclusive on not one, but two occasions already.

Let us know what you think of Echo Combat if you’ve had the chance to jump in already and maybe we’ll see you out there on the battlefield!

The NFL's new sponsorship with Pizza Hut brings an AR experience that will have fans tossing digital sand bags throughout the 2018 season. The 2018 NFL season kicks off this Thursday, and with roughly 16.5 million hungry football fans watching the games, the NFL’s new official sponsor - Pizza Hut – is prepared to deliver pizzas, wings, sides,

Windlands 2 was somewhat hidden at this year’s PAX West. The staff in the convention center didn’t know what I was talking about when I asked about it, but suggested that I head offsite, to the VR play area at the nearby Mattis hotel. There, with a relative lack of ceremony, Windlands 2 was one of the twenty or so games that was available to play at every station.

It’s actually refreshing. Not only was there no attendant hype blitz, but many of the people who would otherwise be there to talk the game up weren’t entirely sure what the game was. In some ways, this was the perfect booth demo: “I think it’s over there. Go play it. Or don’t. Either way.”

When I did finally track the damn thing down, Windlands 2 took some getting used to. In a low-gravity world that looks like it was carefully built out of modeling clay, you play the role of a novice “hunter,” who’s being shown the ropes of the profession by an elderly mentor. This involves exploring the landscape with the help of twin grappling hooks, as well as fighting robots with the help of your trusty bow and arrow.

You spend most of Windlands 2 high in the air, floating between giant rock islands in the sky. If you miss a jump, you simply respawn back on solid ground without much more than damage to your pride, but the fall takes a long time. There’s an entire button dedicated to respawning, the same way puzzle games often have a reset switch for a given room, so you don’t have to watch the landscape rush up at you for any longer than necessary.

Your primary tools for exploration are a pair of grappling hooks, which are linked to the triggers on both controllers, and which can be used independently. You can hook onto specific parts of the landscape above you, mostly the bits that aren’t visibly made out of rock, and use them to pull yourself into the sky.

The trick is that you only really have the momentum generated by that initial pull, so you go sailing in the general direction of your target. From there, you must hook onto your next point, and the next, in such a way as to carefully control your flight through the air. The hooks have a surprisingly long range, but not as long as you might think, and while the areas that can be grappled to are very well-labeled, they’re also surprisingly easy to miss. When it works, you gently soar through the air, flying around like Tarzan in a Technicolor jungle; when it doesn’t, you describe a long, dizzying arc directly towards the ground, and it’s going to be a lot faster to hit the respawn button than it is to wait to land.

I get the feeling this is the sort of thing that’s got a learning curve to it, and which will feel and look amazing once you put in the time to master it.

The award-winning social venture turns its attention to youth athletes with a research-based VR experience dedicated to concussion awareness. “In the next 10 years, the CDC estimates that over 20 million children playing school sports will sustain a concussion. No equipment, including helmets, can prevent concussions, and the overwhelming majority of students, parents, and coaches

For too long there has been a void in your life. You play VR, talk VR, see VR, but do you listen VR? We highly doubt it. And that’s why we’ve set out on a mission to bring you the best, most informative, and very likely the dumbest VR podcast in all of the non-existent metaverse. Welcome to the VR Download.

Every week UploadVR’s editors are getting together to discuss the week’s news and releases. This is VR, though, so we won’t all just be sitting at a desk. Instead, we’ll be doing it… in Rec Room!

Venture back to the Upload clubhouse for this week’s episode in which we run down our list of the 100 VR experiences you should definitely play. David’s gone, though, so we won’t be able to talk about Firewall much. We’ll also skip over the new releases of the week and be answering your questions.

You’re probably sick of hearing this about a VR product but the VR Download is still in its very early days. There will be bugs to iron out and schedules to get straight. If you give us a watch, please let us know what you think we could do better. Also tell us what we did well because Ian’s an egomaniac and he thrives off of praise.

Unity CEO John Riccitiello doesn’t think we’ve yet seen a true consumer launch of a VR or AR headset.

Speaking at this month’s TechCrunch Disrupt event in San Francisco, Riccitiello stated that around two-thirds of all VR and AR applications were built inside the Unity engine, though he reasoned that every device on the market today was really a ‘beta’ kit.

“They’re not cheap enough,” he explained, “they don’t work well enough, you don’t have enough good control systems, you can’t see your arms and your legs in most of them and use them in an interactive way, there’s not a lot of content.”

Despite the fact the likes of the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR (PSVR) headsets are readily available to consumers, then, Riccitiello thinks that they’re intended for a different audience. “AR and VR is mostly to this day been launched to developers,” he said. “I mean, name the content. It’s not there yet. I think it will be there yet.”

Riccitiello continued by explaining that he had been impressed by how fast enterprise had latched on to VR and AR tech. “It’s not a surprise that the commercial applications have preceded the consumer applications because, at least in my mind, we haven’t seen a consumer launch yet,” the CEO explained.

Back in 2016 Riccitiello famously predicted a ‘gap of disappointment‘ for the VR and AR industry, in which headset sales wouldn’t match up to the lofty expectations of analysts and the market. He did, however, later predict that in a few years’ time we would see the devices that really started to breathe life into the market. It’s interesting to hear that, a year and a half on from then, the Unity CEO still doesn’t think launches like Oculus Go or sales of three million units for PSVR equate to a true consumer market.

“AR and VR is not yet a consumer smash, although it’s rising and it will ultimately get there,” he said.

You can shave $50 off the price of the enhanced HTC Vive Pro headset over at Micro Center right now.

The retailer is selling the kit for $649.99 (it usually goes for about $700), which is the cheapest price we’ve yet seen for the 3K VR device. There’s no word on how long this offer is running for and we haven’t seen it anywhere else just yet.

Take note that this is the base unit that only comes with the headset itself; it’s intended for people that already own a regular Vive and wanted to swap it out with this enhanced device, although you can buy a separate set of accessories if you want to jump in from scratch, or pick up the bundle featuring everything you need.

We do wonder if this price drop will be reflected across other retailers later in the year as we start seeing more promotions for holiday deals.

Vive Pro improves upon the regular $500 Vive with a clearer display and integrated audio as well as support for SteamVR’s second-generation base stations. That said HTC has drawn a lot of criticism for the kit’s price since its launch earlier this year, which seems to position Pro as more of an enterprise-level product rather than a true consumer kit. Does a $50 drop change that at all or are you still happy to stick with your regular Vive?

Either way, it should save you a bit of money on that nice new Vive Wireless Adapter launching this month.